The following article contains MAJOR spoilers for the Hacks series finale.

Deborah Vance officially comes full circle in Hacks‘ emotional series finale. At the beginning of the note-perfect Hacks season 5, Deborah’s anger practically fuels the plane ride home from Singapore as she learns she’s been mistakenly reported as dead. However, in the final episode of the award-winning HBO comedy series, it’s revealed that Deborah is dying for real.

Previously in the season, Deborah had a mass removed, but as she tells Ava in the series finale, the cancer has spread. This health downturn causes Deborah to take stock of her life and realize that she’s done it all; she has nothing left to prove, and doesn’t want to put herself through grueling chemotherapy treatments. She plans to have one last fabulous trip to Paris before traveling to Zurich to end her life. She wants to call her own light.

Also wanting to call their own light are Hacks co-creators Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky, and Paul W. Downs. The trio discussed why Hacks season 5 was the show’s last in an exclusive interview with ScreenRant, saying that they wanted “to go out on a high” and “leave the audience wanting more“.

They certainly did, as Deborah changes her mind in the show’s final moments, deciding instead to do one last comedy special, this time about dying. Not only was this the perfect ending for Deborah Vance, but it also exquisitely captured everything that Hacks is about.

Deborah Decides To Live After Writing The Perfect Joke

Deborah and Ava’s Paris trip has both hilarious and heartfelt callbacks to previous gags in the show. Perhaps the funniest is the revelation that, despite mocking Ava’s large hands for multiple seasons, Deborah’s are actually much bigger. However, the most meaningful Hacks Easter egg is its last.

Initially, Ava was heartbroken at Deborah’s decision to end her life and tried everything in her power to get her to change her mind, at first refusing to go on the trip, and then spending the night researching alternative treatments for her best friend’s illness. Realizing that she can’t talk Deborah out of her plan, Ava chooses to accept her best friend’s choice.

Over breakfast while waiting for the train to Zurich, Deborah throws her serial dieting ways out the window and helps herself to a second croissant. An impromptu joke-writing session between Deborah and Ava breaks out as they try to one-up each other in finding the perfect joke about death and eating.

That’s when Deborah has her lightbulb moment. The act of writing jokes makes her realize that she has so many left in her, and she doesn’t want to end her life without getting them out into the world. She chases Ava down and delivers not only the better joke but also the news that she’s going to live and do one more special.

This, of course, is a throwback to the Hacks pilot, when Deborah refuses to hire Ava, and essentially gives up on trying to revive her career — until she comes up with the perfect joke to improve on Ava’s controversial tweet that got her blacklisted in the industry. Deborah then chases Ava down in her car to tell her the joke, and it’s the best decision she ever made, as it led not only to a career revival but also to a wonderful friendship.

Ultimately, as long as Deborah Vance is still breathing, there will always be one joke left in her, and she will deliver it to a rapt audience until she physically can’t do it any longer.

Ava Is Officially A Big, Brave Girl

Another Paris trip callback is when Deborah calls Ava a “big, brave girl.” The first time she did this was at the beginning of season 4, when she mocked Ava for blackmailing her way into the head writer job on Deborah’s late-night show. This time, however, Deborah is 100% sincere.

Despite Ava’s fears about not being able to move forward without Deborah, she already is. When shooting her pilot for the Who’s Making Dinner? reboot, Ava is in control and confident like she’s never been before. She has command of the room, wields authority effectively, and praises competence and good work. As she later tells Deborah, the network loves the pilot and basically has no notes.

The two Hacks main characters have spent the entire show trying to balance Ava’s connection to Deborah with the protégé’s own hopes and dreams. With Ava using her own voice to reboot the sitcom that made Deborah a star, she is honoring their friendship and long-term collaboration while also advancing her own career. It’s clear that when it’s finally time for Deborah to take her final bow, Ava won’t only survive, but thrive.

Jimmy And Kayla Take Over Latitude And Give A Big Middle Finger To AI

When Schaeffer & LuSaque goes under, Jimmy and Kayla hit their lowest professional low, as they are forced to come crawling back to Latitude. To add insult to injury, Kayla’s father, Michael, sticks Jimmy in the mailroom to humiliate him. However, this assertion of dominance backfires in the Hacks series finale, which proves to be a triumphant David and Goliath moment for Jimmy.

While the work may be menial, being in the mailroom gives Jimmy unfettered access to the company’s invoices and billing department. When he is cruelly excluded from a corporate getaway, Jimmy has the entire office to himself and takes advantage of the opportunity to do some digging into Michael’s shady dealings, learning that the head of Latitude has been selling deceased clients’ likenesses and voices to AI companies without the estates’ consent.

It turns out Ava isn’t the only big, brave character, as Jimmy blackmails Michael into giving him and Kayla the company in his most assertive moment since he slapped the phone out of Bob Lipka’s hand near the end of Hacks season 4. Michael has no choice but to surrender.

It’s not a complete victory, however, as Jimmy and Kayla lose half of their employees, who can’t stomach the idea of doing good, hard work and not having swanky corporate perks. And even though they won, the new heads of Latitude still have to deal with slimy big dogs like Lipka.

What’s most important, though, isn’t a win for the little guy but the fact that an industry titan faced consequences for unscrupulously benefiting from AI. The writers of Hacks made their stance on the controversial subject very clear in the earlier season 5, “QuickScribbl,” which saw Ava give an impassioned speech against it and Deborah refusing to sell herself to an LLM AI generator, even though it meant turning down a fat paycheck.

Despite Einbinder and other artists vehemently speaking out against it, AI is still making the world a scary place for writers and other creative professionals. Jimmy and Kayla’s choice to do good work as opposed to caving to corporate greed is an inspirational one, and hopefully sends a message to real-life industry professionals.

Hacks’ Series Finale Is A Love Letter To Las Vegas

Perhaps no show in television history has appreciated Las Vegas more than Hacks, and the series finale expresses the comedy’s sincere love for Sin City. Between breaking a record in Central Park and getting her affairs in order, Deborah also found time to go into the hotel business with Marcus, and the show’s final episode sees the Diva open its doors.

Though many have dismissed Las Vegas as “too loud, too tacky, too much,” these are the exact diminutives Deborah’s detractors have called her. However, as Deborah discusses in her speech at the grand opening, Vegas is the only place in the world that not only allowed her to be her full, authentic self, but embraced her for it.

With the Diva, Deborah and Marcus are giving a home to all the orphan misfits they’ve picked up along the way, hiring Marty to serve as manager and Kiki as “pit mama“. But beyond Hacks‘ motley crew of supporting characters, the Diva will embody the best of Vegas by being a hub for people like Deborah to be unapologetically themselves.

Deborah and Ava aren’t the only leads in Hacks final scene, as Vegas itself has been a main character throughout the show’s five-season run. As Deborah and Ava crack each other up, the very last shot of the entire show is of the Las Vegas Strip, and it’s an absolutely perfect ending.

The Real Meaning Of Hacks’ Series Finale

More than money, more than fame, and more than sticking it to her enemies, what matters the most to Deborah Vance is being funny and doing the work. Earlier in the season, Deborah was struggling with her MSG show because she was too focused on settling scores and speaking out against being persecuted. However, when she gets thrown in jail and cracks a few jokes to cheer up the women inside with her, Deborah immediately straightens out her priorities.

This, over anything else, is why Deborah decides to live. One joke leads to another, which leads to another, which will eventually lead to her last comedy special. No amount of salt-and-pepper shakers or broken records can measure up to the satisfaction that comes with doing genuinely good work.

This sentiment echoes throughout Hacks‘ other characters as well, from Ava showrunning her own series to Jimmy and Kayla running Latitude as it deserves to be run. The show’s title is Hacks, because this is precisely what Deborah is in the pilot, before Ava shakes her out of her career coma and reignites her ambition. By the series finale, Deborah is the exact opposite of a hack, and this is her ultimate legacy.

Release Date

2021 – 2026-00-00

Network

HBO Max

Showrunner

Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, Jen Statsky

Directors

Desiree Akhavan

Writers

Pat Regan, Ariel Karlin, Carol Leifer, Joe Mande, Guy Branum, Andrew Law, Samantha Riley

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